by Kayti McGee
I felt my family’s presence even before I materialized in the clearing. Marion approached me in a blur of speed.
“What happened?” she hissed.
I looked past her. Angelica and Eilus still lay on the ground, breathing but otherwise gone. The coven stood back, some of them holding one another, some with empty expressions.
I panted and leaned against a tree. I didn’t need to feign fatigue; I was exhausted on every level.
“I don’t know,” I said. Although I kept my voice down, it seemed to ring out in the otherwise total silence. Not a witch stirred. The autumn cold wrapped around us. “I felt... something, some power. I left the egregore and came as fast as I could.” I narrowed my eyes at Marion. “You left Angelica and Eilus here, keeping watch?”
“Of course I did.”
“You should have told me.”
Marion scoffed.
“Maybe there are things you should have told us all.” That came from Imogen as she pushed her way through the other witches and stepped toward us. “What happened here?”
“What happened?” Marion repeated softly, to me.
“I don’t know. They were like this when I arrived.” I gestured toward Angelica and Eilus. “And the girl was gone. I’ve been searching, casting. I can’t find a trace.”
Marion turned, hugged herself, and gazed at the bodies. “This is shadow spellwork. How could she...” She trailed off.
I almost felt guilty. Not for one second did she suspect that I might have done this, I who was so gifted in the department of breaking minds.
We all stood there in silence, nearly breathless as we waited for a command from Marion. I closed my eyes. I could have slept.
“Someone did this,” Marion began, her voice clear and sharp. “Not one of our own. She is an outsider, a danger to us all. I had hoped to handle her quietly, but it is clear now that we must come together, hunt her together, and destroy her together.”
I straightened up and stared at the back of her skull as she spoke. If anyone happened to look at me, they would have mistaken my frigid resolve for anger, but it was fear.
Twenty
Rose
It’s not like I didn’t know that Thorn had trapped me well and good. Of course I wasn’t getting out of this room. My temper tantrum was designed to make him feel bad for doing it, so I threw myself against the door until I got tired of mending small fractures in my bones. Then I mostly just got pissed off. Breaking bones hurt, even when you can chant them back together.
I quieted down for a while, thinking up reasons he’d accept for me lying and sneaking off to get the grimoire.
But why did I have to? I shouldn’t have been a prisoner in the first place, not really. And now solitary? Obviously I wasn’t as powerful yet as I would need to be. But I couldn’t possibly get there by being caged. I didn’t even have access to the Summerland painting. I removed every one of his things from his drawers and threw them on the ground just to be spiteful. Then I jumped on the bed for a while. Two things I thought would annoy him enough to get some attention.
Silence from the other side of the door. I checked the clock—I’d only been locked in for forty-five minutes. Surely it couldn’t last much longer. I was going out of my mind already.
But eventually the sun came up with me still inside. I screamed myself hoarse telling that asshole to let me out, but he didn’t. While I was in the bathroom, he placed some food inside the door for me without a word.
The fact that it was my favorite sweet potato hash wasn’t enough to make me eat it. Instead I drank water and waited for him to see that I was hunger-striking. We could talk over food together, whether he actually ate or not, and discuss our plan then. Because surely by this point he had a plan. And like it or not, I would have to have a part in it.
We were in this together.
The sun went down again. I could feel the wards around the property being strengthened. Even the house felt stronger. He was probably setting up crystal grids and drawing sigils. I could be helping. I could be learning.
Instead, time was wasting. The food was replaced while I showered, and my resolve not to eat it had really weakened. A girl could only go so long. Even as I tore through the bowl of pumpkin soup and crusty bread, though, I despised my weakness. I was still so mortal. I needed my grimoire.
“Please!” I yelled through the door. Still nothing from the other side.
I could feel his frostiness in the air, an undertone much like the one I assumed was outside if I had any access to it. My body was still animalistically desirous of the forest. Samhain was approaching, what I would have called Halloween before, and the magic called me to my ancestral rites. There was something very sensual about it, which was probably the only reason I hadn’t decided to hate Thorn Blackmane completely. When the sun rose on yet another day of captivity, I lay down and tried to astral project.
Even with all my practice, it was an endless chore to relax my mind. At first I just fell asleep. Then my thoughts kept drifting. To Thorn, endlessly. The anger I had over what he was putting me through, how he wouldn’t even listen to me. The lust that had entwined with my fury. The need for my grimoire and my need for him were all mixed up in my unsettled mind.
It took another day of lying prone to finally find that silent place within my head and heart. I don’t know how long I spent just floating in that twilight space between thoughts. The outside world melted into the darkness inside me.
Perhaps it was another day later, maybe two, that I heard the voice.
Faint at first, just a tickle on the edge of my consciousness. At first I could ignore it the same way I’d ignored Thorn’s food offerings, or the desire to stretch. Then it started to vibrate. I didn’t just hear it in my head, I heard it in my bones.
“We must speak, Daughter.”
I was so startled I broke the trance-state. Heart pounding, I lay on the bed and tried to rationalize what had just happened. Either my mother had just contacted me from beyond the grave, or the coven had broken our wards and found a way inside my mind. Honestly, either seemed likely. Crazy to think how accepting I was of those options compared to my mindset of only a month before.
I was too weak to spend much time thinking about it. To wonder if Thorn was worried about me, or if he thought I was just pouting.
I just closed my eyes and let it all go until I was outside of myself again, letting my spirit fill first the house, then the woods.
In my mind, the clearing again. This time the scene was different.
It was just Thorn and me. No hooded figures surrounded us. No sharp sense of dread bled through. We crouched on the forest floor together, his dark head and my bright one pressed together over my grimoire. There was wine. Promising. And then our clasped hands disappeared beneath the dirt and I felt the voice again.
“Come to me, Daughter.”
This time breaking the trance was deliberate. I didn’t have any doubts left—Luna was waiting for me. And unlike my first vision, this was one I desperately needed to see come to life. So this time, instead of yelling or throwing something, not that I’d have had the energy, I simply spoke his name.
“Thorn.”
And he appeared like another vision, unlocking the door and coming to me on the bed. How long had passed since I’d spoken? My voice sounded as disused as Rune’s when I tried to tell him what I’d seen. He pressed a finger to my lips. For the guy who had locked me in here for—what, a week? More? I’d lost all sense of time—he sure was tender now, running a hot bath filled with restorative peppermint and murmuring strengthening rune-spells at me.
I sank under the water, letting it fortify my body and mind. When I ran out of air, I sat straight up and smiled at my captor.
“Good news, lover. My mother would like to help us.”
An hour and a few snacks later, Thorn was assured that I wasn’t planning to slit his throat for locking me up. I was assured that he was more at his wit’s end over the events I had set in
motion than being deliberately cruel. We were both assured that whatever led us to this moment was probably much larger than my defiance or his split-second decision.
Those whores the Fates were most certainly involved.
Not that it made either of us any less irritated with each other.
Thorn was quicker to accept my vision of the grimoire and the clearing than I had anticipated, given that he still refused to hear any talk of my first. He handed the precious book to me and we stepped into the painting.
Finally. This place out of place felt just as much like home as Thorn’s house, perhaps more so.
At least inside, the new tension between us had plenty of outlets. The grimoire was both more difficult to read than I had anticipated and easier. The difficulty lay in the handwriting, the ease in the wording. For all that the English language has changed over the years, witch lingo has stayed pretty steady. Lucky me.
I began where one must always begin: at the beginning. Each spell came more easily to my fingertips than the last. I thought it must be my connection to the grimoire, which only strengthened my conviction that I was right to sneak out and find it.
Only a few pages in, I could already see the difference between this magic and the type Thorn had been teaching. Such an irony—the witch’s hitman didn’t actually practice death magic. Only a few pages past that realization and I began to feel the difference in myself as well.
Rather than drawing small amounts of energy from the infinite sources available, these spells asked for all life to be drained from specific sources. By tying the recycling of energy so closely, the power gained was stronger and harsher. And with each sacrifice, I felt more of that living energy entering me as well. It was intoxicating, even more so than the pleasure of casting normally was, or the replenishing I’d become adept at already. That was pot, and this was heroin. Infinitely more addictive.
Thorn watched me with a combination of pride and wariness. I could tell he was pleased by my progress. As the days went by, turned into weeks as the outside world stood frozen behind, I could feel his eyes tracking me closely for signs of the insanity death witches so often succumbed to.
Some days I had to stop, worried that I was.
When I took an ancient oak, and the memories it carried became jumbled with mine and I momentarily became convinced hen-of-the-woods were growing from my legs.
When I took a fox, and grew so ravenous for rabbit that I ate it raw.
When I enjoyed that hunt so much I took seven more rabbits for no reason but the pleasure.
When I realized I didn’t think of it as killing, simply taking. As though other lives were mine to collect or spare, godlike.
But every time, Thorn was there, grounding me. He reminded me who I was. I was Rose Brennan, death witch, now. But I had been Rose (WTF WAS HER LAST NAME) English major, and I had been a nerdy teenager before that and an insecure child before that and at one point I had been Luna’s beloved baby and before that I had other lives as well. He wouldn’t let me fall so deeply into this identity that it consumed me.
Which became another point of contention. The most powerful spells in the grimoire were impossible to practice in here. Both required human lives to complete. Ethically, I understood why he didn’t want to go back out into the world and test them. Practically, I didn’t see why we couldn’t just look up the worst creeps on the sex offender registry and kill two birds, so to speak.
“You know how to kill, Rose. You’ve proven that already. And after what happened at the cabin, I don’t believe you’ll be caught off guard again by disbelieving the coven wants your blood. We aren’t going vigilante on the streets of Boulder so you can rack up a few more kills.”
“I’m not racking up kills. I’m ensuring I won’t freeze up again. The only way to know for sure is to do it.”
“And what happens when you accidentally take in the memories of a child rapist as you store his energy for the next kill?”
I hadn’t quite formulated a good answer for that one when he told me it was time to leave our little paradise. Although—I looked around—it was true that the landscape was rather altered since I brought my grimoire in. Darker.
I liked it better this way.
We’d taken no more than a dozen steps outside when Thorn stopped me, his eyes distant. He paced away, his back to me, and stood silent for a minute. I frowned curiously at his back. When he turned toward me again, the look he gave me froze me to the spot more effectively than any spell.
“Rose. Your mother asked Tessa to look around for you. But Imogen found her first.”
Twenty-One
Thorn
In my mind, Marion’s presence was thick with indulgence. We have a girl, she purred, Rose’s friend. Then she conveyed the image of Tessa, whom I instantly recognized, bound and tethered to the pipework in what looked like a basement. The girl had been gagged and blindfolded, but I didn’t need to see her eyes to know her fear. Her face was completely bloodless. A subtle tremor moved her continually, jostling her cuffs against the pipes.
I allowed no trace of surprise in my reply: How can you be sure?
Imogen heard her asking around town for Rose. Rose is a missing person. It seems she did not tidy up her mortal life before coming to our valley.
And how is this of any use to us? I said. I had turned my back on Rose while I communicated mentally with Marion. She didn’t need to see the look on my face.
We use the girl to draw out Rose. If she has any human sympathies left, she will act to save her friend. They were together very recently, Thorn.
My jaw tightened. How much had Tessa told the witches? Had she mentioned me? Once again, I got the distinct impression that I was walking into a trap.
Come scrape her mind for me, Marion continued. I want to know everything. Then we’ll set her out like bait—a trap for a little rabbit.
I let a sickening smile transfer to the Maven, a smile she could feel.
I’ll come immediately. I’ll make it painful. Maybe Rose can hear her screams.
Rose and I had precious seconds to make a plan.
I turned back to her, my expression as tranquil as possible. For the first time in ages, my heart pulsed with true panic.
“Rose,” I said. “Your mother asked Tessa to look around for you. But Imogen found her first.”
Rose blanched. I pulled her into my arms quickly, firmly, and whispered a word of comfort. The spell power of it settled the air around us, soothing even me.
“We can handle this,” I told her. “We can handle anything. I need to go—”
“No!” she cut in.
“I have to. I’ve been called. Don’t you want me to see Tessa? I need to make sure she doesn’t tell my family anything. I’ll come back as soon as I can. Now listen to me...”
I held Rose by the shoulders, looked her in the eye, and gave her instructions on exactly how she should flee Juniper Hollow if I did not return from the Maven. I urged her to take my car; that was more normal, less expected of a witch. I told her to wear a hat and hood to hide her telltale locks. I told her to ward herself, to ward my car, and to take nothing. There was not a witch in the world I trusted besides Rose, so I could not send her to help. If something happened to me, she had only herself. My stomach turned to a stone block. I knew what happened to Rose if something happened to me. We might meet in Summerland then.
Rose nodded and covered my hands with hers.
“Go,” she said after a minute.
Her fortitude shouldn’t have surprised me. In fact, it strengthened me. I laced our fingers and kissed her on the forehead.
“I’ll come soon,” I promised.
Tessa was being held in Imogen’s basement, of all places. Only Marion and Imogen were at the house. I sensed them as I approached and let myself in. Cautiously, I relaxed as Imogen folded me into her arms.
“I have a present for you,” she whispered at my ear.
This once, her forwardness pleased me. It meant that she
didn’t know I was a traitor, which also meant that Marion didn’t know.
“So I heard.” I gave her a light squeeze. “Show me.”
Imogen took my hand and led me down to the basement. It was dark, but my eyes adjusted immediately. Marion stood across from Tessa. Tessa sat shivering on the cement, her arms pinned behind her back at an awkward angle. When she heard Imogen and I enter the room, her head jerked toward us.
“Who’s there?”
I laughed sharply and strolled toward her. I knelt in front of her and slid my fingers into her hair, touching her scalp. Memory shook me. It seemed like a lifetime ago, although it was mere weeks, that I had gone to Tessa’s doorstep seeking Rose. Tessa had been kind toward me and protective of her friend. As mortals go, she was good—she was innocent. Without a sound, I spoke into her mind.
Listen to me, Tessa. Your life and Rose’s life depend upon this. Do you recognize my voice? You met me once. Stay calm. Don’t speak. I’m here to help.
Tessa quaked and her head yanked away from my fingers.
Marion chuckled. She thought I was already working. And I was, I suppose.
Tessa, I continued. I am going to save you and fix all this, I promise. I’m the man who came to your door to return Rose’s gloves. You can’t let anyone know that we have met, or that I care for Rose. I love her, Tessa. That’s what you need to know. Stay silent while you are here. Don’t speak. I’ll advocate for you. You’re going to be okay.
Tessa shuddered again, but she stopped trying to escape the grip of my palm on her skull.
I need to leave here soon, Tessa, and return to Rose. Together she and I will help you escape. Remember what I said: Don’t talk to anyone but me. All our lives depend on it. And now you need to do something for me. You need to scream, Tessa, and scream as loud as you can. Scream like you’re in pain. Scream.